A couple of weeks ago, we went to a memorial service for my father-in-law. He’s been dead for a number of months, but his friends wanted to get together and have a ceremony for him and we sat there, up front.

Even though they acknowledged that my wife’s father was not, in any way, religious, the people running it insisted on shoving religion into it in every conceivable way.

How about no?

I only bring it up because we received the display case for her father’s military service casket flag today and the box was filled with all kinds of religious mumbo jumbo. I know that kind of thing probably appeals to their target audience, both religious and military, but come on, can’t you care about the ever-increasing number of non-religious people in society?

Granted, these services are for the  good of the living because they dead don’t care, but still, nobody in the family is religious at all. Still, they just kept going on and on and on about religion, praying, playing religious songs, etc. It’s like they don’t care about anyone but themselves.

This is hardly the first time it’s happened. In fact, in every single memorial, that’s how it’s been. Granted, most of them are held in churches and chapels, run by pastors, so I can sort of understand. My wife’s  grandfather, when he died 30+ years ago, he was an ardent atheist who had nothing good to say about religion, yet the service, it was stuffed full of religious tripe. The family had asked up front not to do that and the pastor ignored it. When it came time for people to stand up and tell stories, my wife’s uncle got up and ripped into the pastor, indirectly, saying that if her grandfather was there, he’d have called the whole thing a load of bullshit. I don’t remember him well, but I figure he probably would have.

The same thing happened when my father died 20 years ago. Nobody made any specific requests so I can’t get mad, but some of his friends got up and noted that he was a very staunch unbeliever. In that particular instance, I’m not really upset because, as I said, nobody made any requests and it was just done in the cemetery chapel by someone who had never met my father and they were just doing the standard service and didn’t care. You’d think they might ask, but they don’t care. They’re getting paid to do it and the next body is going to get rolled in as the last is getting rolled out.  That’s how these things work, after all.

It’s not just funerals that this happens at, although I could keep giving examples of people who aren’t religious being used, by the clergy, to push their narrative, but it happens in general society as well. People assume that you want to hear about their imaginary friends all the time. At that very same memorial service, someone came up to my wife and said “he’s with God now.” Good thing she didn’t say it to me or I’d have responded. This was after all of the acknowledgement that he was, in fact, an atheist, that everyone in the family was an atheist. Keep your fucking religious bullshit to yourself. This isn’t being said to comfort the grieving, it’s being said to make the religiously insane happy. They don’t care about anyone but themselves.

I find that absurdly sad.